The Blood Type Diet – A Personal Experience
Can the blood type diet help you lose weight? Yes, but it most likely won’t be a way of eating you can sustain for the rest of your life, as it may be limiting your food choices.
The Blood Type Diet
In my lifetime I’ve tried so many different approaches to eating and dieting that I can’t even count, and with the exception of a few I am still here to say: don’t ever diet because diets don’t work, nor are they healthy. Diets are short-term solutions. To lose weight and keep it off, you have to make lifestyle changes.
But one particular way of eating was very different from anything else I came across: the “Blood Type Diet”. I personally wouldn’t even call it a diet – it’s just a specific way of eating for your blood type. I know there is no scientific backing for it, as EC pointed out on a related subject, but I admit back then I was intrigued about it.
I tried the approach about eight years ago, when me and a few friends decided to find out how it worked on all of us. Back then I had to buy a book called Eat Right For Your Type to make sure we were doing it correctly, but nowadays you can find most of the info on the internet.
The Concept
Anyhow, the book explains it like this:
Your blood type reflects your internal chemistry and actually determines the way you absorb nutrients. The foods you absorb well and how your body handles stress differ with each blood type and plays a key part in losing weight, avoiding disease and promoting fitness and longevity. Based on that knowledge, Eat Right 4 Your Type provides a set of blood type-specific diets to help you learn how to combine the foods that are right for you, to ensure physical and mental well-being, whilst helping guarantee weight loss.
The best part about this eating approach is that there is no restriction in the amount of foods you can eat. If you’ve been reading my articles you know that I absolutely HATE counting calories, measuring food or doing any counting of food whatsoever. So the “just eat this and not that” approach was very appealing to me.
I should also mention that back then when I got into this I ate three times more than I do now; eating a whole chicken followed by three plates of other foods was a regular occurrence in my eating habits back. That always astonished people around me, but you have to remember that back then I was still an extremely active circus artist and burnt through food like a racing car through gas.
Getting Started And Keeping Going
First thing you of course have to do is to find out your blood type, which you can do by either going to the doctor or with a blood type kit in a health food store, which is what I did. I found out I was O Positive, which meant I was to eat foods that were specific to that blood type and follow the books tables showing what foods were beneficial or neutral for and what I should avoid. Which was simple enough for me.
As I got into swing with this eating approach, I noticed that I never felt hungry, but always full and satisfied. I mainly ate the beneficial foods, rarely those on the neutral list and always avoided the ones I was supposed to. But t definitely didn’t feel like a diet. I daily ate plates and plates of food – I would even say more food than usual. When before I had to control myself somewhat, with this way of eating I didn’t have to at all.
Within about a week I noticed my pants were starting to become quite loose on m. Within a month I lost more weight than I set out to lose in the beginning and the scale showed me a loss of 18 lbs. A bit more actually than one would deem healthy. Two of my girlfriends that did this diet with me also lost huge amount of weight. Because it happened in such a short time everyone around us began to wonder if something was wrong with us and if maybe we were starving ourselves. But we were doing quite the opposite: we were stuffing our faces, except nobody believed us.
I kept eating this way for about four months and then the loss leveled off. If that was my body’s “preset weight” it wanted to have or if the calories in vs. out simply reached balance I leave to you.
One thing that I’ve learned about my body while eating this way is that for my blood type I absolutely need animal protein. Because a few years prior I had tried being a vegetarian and it made me really sick. I didn’t understand why because so many people were able to be a vegetarians. But I wasn’t.
Final Thoughts
To me the only down side with this eating approach was that there were a lot of foods on my avoid list that I absolutely loved, such as certain fruits and nuts, and after a while I really began missing those foods as part of my daily life. It was also a bit harder to order at restaurants because half of the ingredients in my dish would be in the avoid section.
Would I recommend it? For a period of time, yes. But not for the rest of your life. For me this was definitely by far the best eating approach among the diets I tried and many people who tried it as well lost lots of weight too. It also didn’t seem to have any side effects, but then again avoiding fruits and such probably is not that good an idea. In the long run life is all about balance, and today that is exactly the way of eating I promote.
Pictures courtesy of Ollie Craaford and “Ednaar“.
3 Comments
Well thank you for sharing your experience on this way of eating. Did you do the test ( secretor or non secretor)?
your experience convinces me to read the book as I have a few pounds to lose
All best
Denise
That is a good question, OMG I don’t even remember which one I was. But it’s definitely one of the best things I’ve tried, cause I’m not good with restricting my self or diets in general.
Yep I also tried this diet, I received the book as a present from my lovely step-grandma 😉 And the most significant improvement about if for me, was that it helped me to curb my allergies problem!! I was even having daily medication for it, my nose was runny and itchy for a good part of the day, my eyes were so itchy, my skin very reactive to everything etc… (still is but in a lesser degree).
Well the thing is that oranges are a big no-no for me! In the book, it says that I can still eat grapefruit, and that has proven that to be true in my case. I used to have an orange as a part of my daily breakfast. I never felt anything strange in my stomach, but sure it produces some reaction, as when I gave up them, my allergies dissapeared almost completely!
The 2nd part of it was to reduce flours in general, as I had lots of biscuits, normal bread and stuff like that. By reducing their intake to a minimum, I had even less allergic reactions and if continued in time, weight loss.
I read the book like 5 years ago, and those are the only things from it that I keep in mind and control. I found it to be very helpful, and having in consideration any other conditions one may have before deciding giving up a specific food or increase their intake, I don’t find it to be any harmful, but quite the opposite. One can learn and improve a lot from it 🙂
Thanks for sharing your experience and shedding light on this 🙂